No Progress in Fifteen Years

Ben Casselman:

The government’s release last week of income and poverty data for 2013 brought renewed attention to the apparent stagnation of the American middle class — not just since the financial crisis hit six years ago this month, but for much of the decade that preceded the crash. The report showed that the economic recovery has yet to translate into higher incomes for the typical American family. After adjusting for inflation, U.S. median household income is still 8 percent lower than it was before the recession, 9 percent lower than at its peak in 1999, and essentially unchanged since the end of the Reagan administration. “As a country,” New York magazine’s Annie Lowrey wrote Friday, “we peaked in the late 1990s.”

This reminds me of The Matrix, in which the AI remarks, “1999, the height of your civilization.”